They Unpaved Paradise

City limits, property lines and state borders appear clear and inviolable on a map. But things are trickier on the ground, and even more so on the water, where such neatly drawn lines are bypassed by flooding rivers or wandering runoff. Water, particularly in ever-shifting wetlands, meanders between civilization and wilderness, reminding us that both are conduits in a larger circulatory system.

In April 2009, at the tail end of a drought, the photographer Christoph Gielen flew in a helicopter over one such ailing system, South Florida. He took shots of sloughs and hammocks, tear-drop islands and estuaries. Though often dozens of miles from the nearest planned community, the effects of sprawl were written all over the terrain: marshes reduced to a fraction of their former size; shrinking river-delta channels, known as sloughs; and the infamous “white zone,” a stagnant, hyper-salinated coastal area that has crept inland from the Atlantic since 1940. All of these are indicators of a dying ecosystem, driven to collapse by overdevelopment.

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Yet the resulting images are near-abstractions; at first glance, it’s hard to realize that the photos were taken through a wide-angle lens, aimed from 10,000 feet above Everglades National Park. They are a testament to how mutually entwined the built and natural environments have become. Fortunately, thanks to recent efforts to control and even shrink South Florida’s residential sprawl, they may also document the turning point in the region’s relationship with its natural surroundings.

While it may look happenstance, sprawl throughout Florida (and, indeed, the entire country) was, at least in the beginning, tightly coordinated. In the 1940s and ’50s, the federal government subsidized highways and provided cheap insurance, low-interest loans and tax incentives for residential and commercial developments outside cities. Most legislators had thought this horizontal growth would boost living standards and the economy, since the suburbs offered an escape from faltering and unhealthy cities.

There was another justification as well. As Congress argued in the 1954 Housing Act, the increased space between homes and industries reduced “the vulnerability of congested urban areas to enemy attack.” If it happened in Hiroshima, it could happen here: a mushroom cloud rising above New York or Chicago. Urban concentrations were vulnerable; the suburbs spread out populations. Sprawl was civilian defense in the atomic age. Developers advertised that their subdivisions lay “beyond the radiation zone.”

South Florida’s grid expanded faster than most, propelled not just by federal incentives but also by promises of paradise. Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach merged into a megalopolis, while gated golf communities battled with office parks for Gulf Coast real estate. Nature couldn’t move out of the way quickly enough: alligators strolled strip malls and highway clovers in search of mating grounds they’d never find again.

But it wasn’t just wildlife that was having trouble. Within a few decades, South Floridians were besieged by gridlock, water shortages and, according to a 1995 report by the Governor’s Commission for a Sustainable South Florida, a landscape of “mind numbing homogeneity.” By the 1990s, half the historic Everglades had been paved or drained. Water tables in the region plummeted. Droughts and hurricanes punched harder. Seeking to reverse a half-century of land use policy, the commission argued for “harsh measures” to curtail suburbanization.

By the turn of the millennium a critical mass of South Floridians had begun to realize that if they wanted to keep their sun-kissed shorelines and balmy breezes, they’d have to broaden their understanding of “home,” so that it stretched through the pipes of their ranch houses, villas and condos and into the arteries of their watershed. Every toilet flush, garden hose and frozen margarita depended on the health of the swamps lying just beyond their communities, which in turn depended on water that had once flowed in a shallow, 100-mile long, 40-mile-wide sheet from Lake Okeechobee into Florida Bay.

Few have taken on the task of reimagining South Florida sprawl and its relationship with nature more aggressively than Bruce Babbitt, Bill Clinton’s secretary of the interior. As secretary, he orchestrated an unprecedented government effort to re-stitch the severed arteries of the Everglades together, so that the ecosystem might retain some semblance of its former capacity as a critical aquifer and hotbed of biodiversity. He hoped it could become a model for challenging postwar settlement patterns across the country.

In his 2005 memoir, “Cities in the Wilderness,” Secretary Babbitt sounds not unlike a scholarly Earth First!er when he writes of his motivation for the project: “As a society, we have always assumed that land, once occupied, was ours, forever lost to the natural world, no matter how great the environmental damage.” In the 21st century, that assumption has fallen apart. Now, he writes, longer-term land-use strategies necessitate that the government “would have to organize a retreat from occupied territory.”

And, thanks in part to Mr. Babbitt’s efforts, that’s what has begun to happen in South Florida. Starting in the 1990s, federal and state agencies have bought thousands of undeveloped subdivisions and sugar plantations for wetlands conversion. They drew an urban boundary around the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach megalopolis to limit its growth and increase its density, which also helped to re-glamorize their downtowns. More recently, with widespread grassroots support, they initiated an $8 billion, 30-year plan to restore 25 percent of the Everglades ecosystem. And just last year, they began raising the Tamiami Trail Highway, which has severed water flow from the national park for decades, onto pylons, allowing water to pass underneath it.

Like water, most planners have simply been following the path of least resistance, channeled in the postwar years by national legislation. Relying on maps, they drew subdivisions and shopping malls that ignored the subtle but powerful laws of nature. How might these development patterns change if, instead, they were designed according to an anti-sprawl model? What new configuration of the built and natural environments would best reflect contemporary understandings of freshwater scarcity, habitat fragmentation and climate change?

Secretary Babbitt has an idea. “I think the United States of the twenty-first century should start to look more like an archipelago of cities in a sea of open landscapes,” he said.

While exhilarating, his vision would require far more imagination and coordination than did the population-dispersal policies of the last century. Still, the postwar legislative models themselves map out the how-tos of epic transformation: by partnering with states, the federal government established criteria and incentives that radically altered centuries-old settlement patterns within a decade. Couldn’t this federal approach be implemented again, but this time to promote open-space programs and infrastructural redevelopment, perhaps, again, in the name of national defense?

Mr. Gielen’s photographs capture the moment when we may be seeing the first benefits of this historic attempt at reconciling ecosystems and development. In 2009, wading birds, the Everglades’ indicator species, returned in numbers not seen since the 1940s. A fluke or a trend? Park scientists have hypotheses, though nothing yet for the record. But keep your fingers crossed. Because if $8 billion, 55 inches of annual rainfall and bipartisan support still can’t harmonize South Florida’s built and natural environments, it doesn’t bode well for the many other regions where similar crises are mounting. Think of South Florida as our nation’s indicator species.

Christoph Gielen, left, is a photographer who specializes in the intersection of art and environmental politics. Tim Doody is a New York City-based freelance writer.

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